At least one recent Premier League manager is known to have forbidden his daughters, with a skinny-handed Ancient Mariner fervour, from ever marrying a footballer. It may be fair to add another caveat: Premier League footballers should, if possible, avoid marrying women who are willing to marry Premier League footballers. This is nobody's fault, but is instead an inevitable product of the peculiar plastic universe of the modern footballer, an environment peopled by hustlers and fixers, goons and creeps, profiteers, brutes, aardvarks, baboons, popinjays, sea cucumbers, bilious barnacles and a distinct species of sharp-taloned power-woman: irradiated by spray-on celebrification, empowered by bloodless consumer-lust, willing stooges to the textureless inanities of football's captive princes, big-haired, money-glossed, and dressed alternately in vamp-glam predator chic or the fashion-tracksuits of the basking social athlete.

With this in mind it was a bit surprising to hear Roberto Mancini suggest earlier this week that now may be the ideal moment for Mario Balotelli to get married. "It could be that marriage would help him," Mancini said, albeit under provocation from the latest episode in the miscellany of unbounded zaniness that now surrounds Balotelli, a player recast by the tabloid press from burgeoning scandal-magnet into a largely benign figure, a kind of man-child semi-cretin most commonly spotted unicycling around Manchester city centre with a beggar under one arm, playing croquet in a top hat made entirely from parmesan cheese or hijacking a school bus and driving it to Narnia.